Cookbooks for Children

 

 

With the proliferation of cookbooks for sale in the late 19th century it's probably not surprising that some authors and publishers in America and Britain decided to focus on a specific market: young girls just learning their way around the kitchen.  While children’s cookbooks in the mid-20th century included boys in their audience, these early works were targeted toward girls. Books including non-white children did not appear until much later.

The earliest kid’s cookbook I’ve found is The Cooking Club of Tu-Whit Hollow by Ella Farman Pratt, published in Boston in 1876.  It tells the story of Lolly, a girl who lives in an idyllic rural town. Intellectually curious but bored, she wants to start some kind of activity that she and her friends can do together.  After rejecting a number of ideas, she settles on a cooking club. 

Calling this a cookbook is, perhaps, being a bit generous. No cooking takes place until Chapter 4, “Setting Bread”, and the recipe is embedded in the narrative. It’s more of a book about girls who cook together than a book that will instruct girls on how to cook.

 Six Little Cooks, or, Aunt Jane's Cooking Class by Ella Farman Pratt was published a year later in Chicago. This is also told as a narrative story, but is more directly an effort to teach cooking skills.  Grace asks her Aunt Jane to teach her how to cook and invites several friends to join them. to In the book the girls are asked to bring a blank book and write down the recipes for each lesson. 

The first lesson includes cake, custard, and popovers. The story is wrapped around a total of  207 recipes which are indexed at the end.

My favorite story book/cookbook combination is The Mary Frances Cook Book or Adventures Among the Kitchen People by Jane Eayre Fryer, published in 1912 in Philadelphia.  Mary Frances’s mother had written a cookbook to teach her daughter to cook.  Before the first lesson the mother becomes ill and Mary Frances wants to try and cook something on her own.  She is helped by the Kitchen People, all the kitchen pots and pans and tools who are actually alive. Through the course of the book she cooks for lunch, a party, a picnic, and dinner: a total of 40 recipes with whimsical illustrations.

A facsimile reprint of the book was published in 1998.